What happens to people who stop believing in free will (The Conversation)

Aaron Walton (PhD candidate, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences), The Conversation, 2026-07-26. Where determined argues that free-will doesn’t exist, this asks the empirical question next door: what changes in someone who accepts that? The received worry is that free-will scepticism licenses bad behaviour; Walton argues that’s overstated and that the messaging has benefits.

The evidence offered

• Two experiments (260 and 262 participants): exposure to arguments against free will increased self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others and reduced hatred. These are the author’s own.
• A 44-country survey, n = 8,917: stronger belief in free will was associated with harsher punitive responses to everyday wrongdoing.
• Forgiveness is separately a well-supported predictor of wellbeing and healthier relationships.

The counter-evidence he acknowledges

Earlier studies found free-will scepticism increased cheating and aggression — the basis of the standard warning. Walton’s response is that these “have often failed to be replicated,” which is the replication-crisis doing real work in an argument rather than being mentioned as a caveat. He also grants that shame is linked to depression, anxiety and suicide, and that too much self-forgiveness may reduce the motivation to change; and he does not claim believing in free will is simply harmful.

How to read it

T3. A researcher writing for a general audience about his own findings, so the framing is motivated and the two experiments are his. But it does what this spoke asks: names sample sizes, cites a large cross-cultural survey, and states the contrary literature instead of ignoring it.

Note what the argument does not need. Whether free will exists is untouched here; the claim is only about the effects of belief. That makes it the cleanly empirical member of the free-will trio — and the answer to the objection that Sapolsky draws practical conclusions his neurobiology can’t support, since the practical question turns out to be separately testable.

The standing caution runs the other way too: an effect measured in ~500 undergraduates-plus-online participants, published by its author in a newspaper, is exactly the shape of finding the last fifteen years taught this field to discount.

Related

free-will · determined · replication-crisis · robert-sapolsky · synthesis